Oof

I haven't been writing much, and eventually I'll probably regret that.  Later I'll wonder how I felt throughout pregnancy, and there won't be a record.  Maybe the lack of notes means I'm busy being instead of analyzing, for a change, though I won't bet on that.  Maybe if I wrote all the time it would just be one long refrain on "I'm tired and mostly frightened of the future."

I wish I could say I'm at one with the mystery of creating a child.  Yes, baby clothes (and things) are really cute.  I held a three week old baby this weekend and he was beautiful.  I see that this all has a magic I'm lucky to experience.  I didn't get pregnant because I thought I should or my husband wanted children or my parents needed grandchildren.  I did it because I honestly love kids and think it ought to be exciting and fun to have a family.  It's unexplored territory, new horizons.

Truth: most of the time I feel like I'm losing myself already, and the baby isn't even born yet.  I'm not resenting the baby, still far from it, but so much of my being has been tabled while I do this new thing that I don't feel myself.  I feel like a washed out, faded version of myself.  Hormones flood my body and this temporary state feels permanent, as if my personality were a balloon leaking air.

And just when I get worked up, I have to take a nap.

I know the idea of an excuse to be lazy and eat a lot of food sounds great, but in practice it isn't.

Now, I gotta go take a nap.  I hope...I don't know, I hope it turns out the baby is taking a third of my oxygen, blood supply, and energy, and when he/she is born, I'll discover I have all those things back - plus a new baby that my body grew all on its own.

And I hope radio drama makes a big comeback in the US so if I'm ever pregnant again I have something I can do to keep me sane.

Conversation

Me: Well, think about when your girlfriend finally moved in.  Remember how you felt?

H: Yeah, it felt like a huge commitment that I wasn't sure I was ready for, but her lease had expired and the clock was ticking and I had to just give it a shot.

Me:  Ok, so imagine that instead of your girlfriend, who you knew you loved, you were getting ready to take in a mail-order bride.  You've only seen a couple of blurry pictures of her, you've never talked to her, and you don't have any idea if you'll like her or not, but to get the paperwork to clear, you'll be married to her, so the commitment is guaranteed.

H:  Oh, that would have made me way more anxious, yes.

Me:  But wait.  Turns out, not only does she not speak English, she doesn't speak at all, in fact, she doesn't know any basic skills, like how to feed and dress herself, and you'll have to teach her every bit of it, from the ground up.

H:  I think I see where this is going.

Me:  AND then it turns out you have to give up a third of your blood supply, energy, and oxygen for nine months just to keep her alive. 

H: And to make this metaphor work, you gotta include that there won't be any sex.

Me:  Right.  Yes.  That's sort of what having a baby feels like right now.

Urgle

I'm having a little bit of a rough day.  Rough week?   Rough time?  I guess not really a...

Wait.  So. I'm used to being pretty lucky, overall.  And the internal monologue that runs things over in my head usually tells me I have nothing to complain about!  Look at how everything is working out ok!  I'm not destitute, or alone, no one in my life has died super recently.  When my problems are things like gaining too much weight, then overall my life is on the plus side.  (Not to derail where I'm going here, but that's a very individual comment about myself.)  

Next week I'll be six months pregnant.  I've heard endless horror stories about the pregnancies of others, sickness and issues and all sorts of stuff that can go wrong.  Everything is going pretty well for me - I'm generally healthy, I haven't been super sick, and overall things are starting to come together - we've got some stuff, for instance.  More is coming.  It'll be fine.

If you, dear reader, can just know that I am aware I'm lucky, could I just trouble both of us to put that aside for a second?

Because I currently feel terrified and guilty and worried and out of control.

First, I feel a lot of guilt at just plain getting pregnant.  It is super hard for a lot of women, especially women my age.  It wasn't simple for me - we'd been at it about three years before it happened, so I'm not one of those oh-as-soon-as-we-decided-to-do-it-it-happened-as-if-by-magic!  (I feel as if those people should be kicked.  If it's easy for you, great, but no one needs to hear you brag.)  But even though we are pregnant now, it's a little like finally getting picked for the volleyball team only to find your friends haven't all made the cut - you feel guilty, even if that choice wasn't yours in the slightest.  I mean, why me and why not everyone who wants this?  

This leads me to worry about some of the people I had to tell.  When we were trying, I had moments when someone would tell me they were pregnant when internally I would cringe, because here was yet another person who had somehow gotten something right and I couldn't.  I don't ever want to make someone feel like that, but I'll bet at least one of the people I had to tell recently probably did end up feeling bad about it.  I hate that.  I don't ever want my success (especially one I didn't control) to make someone else feel less successful.  

That dilemma leads me to something else: I don't need anyone else to be excited about this baby I'm having.  I needed my parents to be excited, and happily, they are.  But everyone else gets a pass.  Don't get me wrong - I find it incredibly generous when people are excited for us, and I appreciate it.  But our culture places such value on having kids that everyone feels like they have to go ape-shit for every baby that's born.  You don't!  If you're not into kids, more power to you!  Congrats!  Whatever you decide to put your energy into, that has value as far as I'm concerned.  (Well, maybe not internet porn or your membership in some hate group, but everything else.  I can get behind crochet and bird-watching, for instance.)  I do not expect everyone to adore my child just because it is a child.  That's my job.

Right now I'm living in the middle of all of the no and none of the yes.  There are all these things I can't do - I have to turn down endless auditions, I can't drink, I can't eat sushi, I am slowly losing the ability to lie down on my back, I can't exercise the way I used to, soon I won't be able to see my toes.  And I fully expect that these slight denials will be balanced by the hopefully wonderful experience of having a child.  But I don't know that yet because I don't have the child yet.  So I'm turning things down right and left, all for some perceived future benefit.  This is fine.  This is called delayed gratification.  It is also really hard.  As human beings, we don't handle delayed gratification well, and I am no exception.

All I can see is what isn't, and I have nothing of what will be to soothe the blow.

Still - I'm terrified that I'm not giving up enough - am I eating too much? (Yes.)  Am I doing all the right things to keep the baby healthy?  (No idea.)  Will some tiny thing I do thinking it won't matter too much have some irrevocable impact on my child's life? (Who knows?)

Also:  I'm terrified because people have endless endless expectations of parents.  Many of which I don't agree with.  We had to register because someone is kindly throwing us a party, and all I could think was, why don't you just give us your old stuff?  Why do we have to go through buying new stuff?? Will the baby be that aware that other people have slept in this crib, for instance?  Or read these books?

Don't get me started on how stupid it is that nothing for babies is gender neutral.  We don't know whether it is a boy or a girl, but everything is classified and produced either in pinks with bows and flowers or in blues with trucks and dogs.  What would be so very horrible about a line of clothes in greens or reds or yellows with animals on them?  We tell ourselves that gender typing is biological but we treat ONE HOUR OLD INFANTS differently depending on their gender???  We registered for clothes that were pretty gender neutral but most of those are labeled "BOY" - so now everyone in the family thinks we're having a boy.  Which hey, we might have, but we just don't know.  It. Is. Infuriating.

That's just the stuff.  People have expectations about what you'll do, how you'll manage, how you should run your life, whether you've planned where the kid will go to school, EVERYTHING.  

Aside:  One of the first comments we got from one family was, "You need more money, of course."  Really??  We're not flush, but we can feed, house, and insure ourselves.  I think overall a lot of people have kids who can't do those things.  Are the most successful kids you know the ones who grew up with the most money?  No, they aren't, are they...

Then.  My body isn't my own anymore.  It belongs to some tiny being with apparently really long legs (we don't know the gender but this child's femur was in the 95 percentile for length) that I don't know and I'm not absolutely positive I can handle.  The fact that it is hanging out and using me as a growing platform means my body is flooded with hormones I can't control, and I am at the mercy of its whims.  It doesn't feel like kicking to me, but I get these pulses of movement, not painful but very distracting.  It's gotten harder to sleep.  It's gotten more uncomfortable.  And this is just the beginning of the discomfort.  It will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Worst: I feel all of the above - terror, fear, anxiety, irritation, etc. - but somehow those all feel wrong.  I should be blissfully happy at all times, right?  I should be thrilled and excited!  I am, sometimes.  But not always, and every time I get more nervous, I feel I've betrayed this child before it even gets here.  

And, hahaha!  I was feeling all of this for months when I couldn't tell anyone why.  Because miscarriage is a reality, as common as one in three pregnancies for women my age end in miscarriage.  That is terrifying.  I couldn't talk about it, I couldn't open myself up telling anyone about it when it could end so suddenly.

So I'm having a little bit of a rough day.  I hope it will pass.  I still expect it's all worth it.  I just don't know yet, and that's terrifying.

Shock

I'm in shock and there's no time to absorb it.  Oh, I'm fine - I just woke up this morning in London and will go to bed in Chicago and tomorrow I'll fly to Washington, D.C.  I'm a little travel weary but basically surviving.

Yes, the rest of the trip continued to be wonderful.  What I lacked in personal reflection time I more than made up for by seeing people I adore, who seem to continue to feel the same about me, stunningly.  And they all live extraordinary and creative lives, even the ones who think they don't.  It's pretty humbling and inspiring to see.

And those were the folks I had time to see!

More eventually.  First, laundry, repacking, a little work catch-up, dinner, and BED.

Almost a fairy tale

Gorgeous day.  It's hard to realize that people live like this, live in this city every day and can enjoy it.  Of course, a lot of London is dirty and unsafe, but lots of it is parks and pubs and structures that date to the eighteenth century or farther.  Even if you don't live in a luxury flat with a Thames view, you can leave your grimy bedsit and go off to any one of the free museums that look like palaces.  We were in the Natural History Museum today, and it's gorgeous, ornate and yet restrained, multicolored stones and stolid skeletons, stuffed birds and wild sculptures.

I went up to Hampstead, my very first stomping grounds, looked in the window of the Worrell House (my first ever London address) while a ginger cat sat on the ledge and watched me watching some student practice guitar.  I walked down over Primrose Hill (Sylvia Plath lived nearby at one point), then down through Regents Park.  I went over the canal bridge that runs through the Park.  I wanted to use the path along the canal but I was worried I wouldn't have enough time for the long way.  I like the canal path because it backs up to the London Zoo, so as you trot along you have every chance of running across the odd wild horned animal peering at you through the fence.

I used one of the rentable bicycles and manuevered from Baker Street (the line of tourists outside of 221B Bake Street was comical, not least because they were all wearing yellow hats - a school group, I presume) all the way to Exhibition Road, which boasts the NHM as well as the V&A, which I wish I'd had time to wander through, if only desultorily.

After a truly amazing Salgado photography exhibit, I ended up picnicing by the round pond in Kensington Gardens, looking back on Kensington Palace, the place Victoria lived before she became queen.

It was beautiful, all of it.  Did I mention it rained most of the day?  Didn't matter.  It was beautiful.

The wood

I must must must go to bed, but today I went to a magic place that I will try to describe in more detail later - a ten acre ancient woodland owned by some friends of mine off a canal near Basingstoke.  Ancient woodland means the trees have been there at least 400 years - not these same trees, perhaps, but there is a particularly lovely yew tree that may be 300 years old.  It's magnificent.  We made a fire and cooked an amazing dinner over it (roasted portabellos, grilled cheese, sausages, salad, bits of lamb, hummus, irish soda bread, cheeses - incredible), and went boating on the canal in a boat that unfolded out of a bag and that came out of a neighbor's shed - the neighbor has a house with a thatched roof, some donkeys and some decorative sheep.

The whole thing was really out of a novel of some sort - the idea of what England is, only this was really happening as if it is completely normal and everyday.  I was...I was delighted.  Charmed.

Now I must go to bed.  Sigh.  So few days, so much to stuff in them.

Ah, yes

I'm sitting in one of my favorite kitchens in the world, a sunny, bright yellow and green l-shaped room smack in the middle of Chiswick, London.  It's glorious, and wonderful, and odd.  It feels so much like home and yet I haven't lived here in 13 years, plus I haven't even visited for five.  I spent the day with my friend Maeve yesterday.  We haven't seen each other properly for eight years (on skype occasionally, but not in person), and yet it was almost as if no time had passed.

Yet I miss my husband, and I am here knowing I have been incredibly lucky the past few years, and that being happy here is partly the result of having made some happiness at home, in my actual life, with my lovely husband, who it must be admitted I miss dreadfully.  (He was spectacularly supportive about me coming to visit here, then when I booked the ticket he started moaning about how sad and lonely he'd be without me. Awww.)

Also, I think everyone knows now, more or less, but I don't think I've mentioned out loud here that I'm pregnant.  Which is exciting, but changes things.  It's also why I'm here - it was a pleasure to tell people in person, but more importantly, I can't imagine I'll have an easy time traveling for a few years after the baby comes.  In January.  Of 2014.

Yep.  Gonna have a baby.  A life-changing, possibly life-absorbing baby.  It seemed a good time to go haring off across the globe and check in with a self I left behind about twelve years ago.  And more importantly, with all the folks who are important to me on this side of the pond, not just myself.

It feels very natural to be here, not forced or strained.  There's just a hint of uncertainty before arriving somewhere or seeing someone for the first time, the pause of do-I-remember-how-this works? and then it eases, and all is well, and I am content.

I picked a time back home where there was no specific work scheduled, but of course, people keep needing things, which is annoying.  Or perhaps more annoying is that I can tell they need them, since my iPad works just fine and email comes through.  Oh, technology, keeping me tied to obligation.

More soon - mostly it's been old friends and very ordinary experiences that I am thrilled to go through - buying biscuits, riding the underground, looking out the windows of trains, getting a proper calendar in the stationery shop.  It's all regular and non-touristy and non-epic and I love it.  Hopefully there will be epic things to report soon.  I'll try to keep a log.

Bizarre and no mistake

Well, this has been an odd day, to be sure, spent almost entirely with my mother and managing to fulfill at least some of her wishes. We visited lots of people, although she claims she had about thirteen people she wanted to have over for a luncheon, but couldn't figure out how to invite certain different subsets together - they wouldn't get along, they wouldn't have commonalities.  So instead we had lunch with one person (and had invited a second but she couldn't come), went by to visit another person (we'd also spoken to that person's daughter but she wasn't available), and then stopped by yet one last person's house.  Strategic road work helped us jettison plans to take one last person home from work.  (The one I really wanted to see I called, but she's not well enough for visitors.) So all in all, we dealt with six or seven of the thirteen.  I have NO IDEA who the other ones are.

Though I enjoyed seeing these people, they are all sweet ladies that I do adore and was happy to see, I think my mother's assertion that "they want to see you so much!" is false in the extreme.  And after today, I feel it would be more accurate to say she just wanted to show me off.

But here's the weird part.  I grew up having it drilled into my head that no one wants to hear you talk about yourself. I've internalized this idea to a large extent and while I often run off at the mouth about myself, I always end up feeling guilty and ashamed about it.  Yet today my mother actively encouraged me to tell these women about myself.  I kept hearing: "Tell her about how big the crew was..."  "Tell her about what he said to you about hand modeling..."  "Tell her what you thought he said!  Oh, this is so funny."  It was at odds with this idea that as a well-bred younger person, my job was to ask questions and listen with enthusiasm.

But the conclusion it brings me to is that she is proud of me, and proud of all the things I'm doing, not just the ones I assume she approves of, but also how I struggle to work as an actor and keep working and continue plugging away at the profession.  I can hardly believe it, but there's not really any other way I can explain her behavior.

The down side (always a down side, right?) is that she then spent this evening pulling old clothes out of the closet in hopes I would take them home and add them back into my wardrobe.  And these are items I don't ever want to see again, much less wear again.  Sigh.  She always and forever insists on trying to make me dress like a 60+ year old.  When I humor her enough to try something on that I know I will abhor, she tries to convince me I really look great in it.  I do not.  I promise.

But I try to be grateful while firm that some items I simply won't wear, despite the fact wearing them would age me 30+ years instantly.  And I try not to be appalled that items I thought I managed to get rid of 15 or more years ago (and will never fit my mother), she's been hanging onto.  And just because I explain I don't ever want to wear them again will not inspire her to donate them or throw them away. Siiiggghhh.

The unsung

I'm pretty tired, and it was a really long day, genuinely tiring, but it was a really cool experience to shoot this commercial today. I want to write about it in more detail, though I can't do it all justice tonight.  Tonight I just want to say how much work goes on behind the scenes of something like that, work that no one ever sees.  In fact, if you were aware of that work, it would probably mean it was being done poorly.

Trust me, though I'm the only person you'll see on-screen, there were probably over 30 people working on this thing today, and most of them were working their butts off.  From the continuity lady making sure every word is correct, to the prop guys painstakingly cleaning and resetting everything I touched, to the wardrobe lady who bought a trillion tops in order to get they would approve for me to wear, and a whole host of other people who were working really hard and I don't even know their titles...it's amazing, a ton of people are working to make small things seem effortless and easy.

It was a really nice crew.  I hope I get to work with some of them again someday.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Y'ALL.  Y'ALL!

I just booked a national commercial.

Seriously, someone is going to pay me some insane amount of money to stand in front of a camera and talk about something for 30 seconds, and then eventually you will see my smiling face on your tv telling you thing is great (and frankly, it sounds pretty great), and eventually I will get a check for that insane amount of money and I will get to put that ad right smack on my resume and think, "BOO-YAH."

There are so many good sides to this I can't even begin to tell you about it.

Actually, there's a whole section of good sides I can't get into right now - we'll just save those for another post.

But here are two I can let you in on:

1 - the audition was at a casting agent I rarely get called into.  Now, you don't have to be a genius to see that if someone starts booking things, you are far more likely to call them again.  So I hope this translates into further opportunity.

2 - the audition was through an agent I like and want to earn money for - I want to be one of the people they trust to send out on bigger and bigger auditions.  A bunch of movie and tv stuff is filming in the next year or so in Chicago, and while I have no expectation of being cast in any of it, I haven't ever been called in to audition for one tiny speck of it, so it would be great if I could at least start being seen.  That's where the money is, of course, and that's where the validation of doing this for a "living" comes in - anyone can believe in you when they've seen your mug on tv.  (And to take away the money aspect, I think all that work would be really fascinating - I've never done much of it, so for me it would be a cool gig to see how it works.)

To back up: just plain getting and doing this job is going to be a monetary windfall at a VERY convenient time, but I also hope it gives me some greater possibilities down the line.

But all of that is far more rational that I feel.  I feel:  wheeeeeeeee!!!!!  You know in a life of rejection, it feels really really really good to freakin' book one.

I mean.  Really good.  I hope everybody's having as good a day as this one.

Filing Cabinet

Hooray!!  I bought a new (well, used, but barely) filing cabinet!  Instead of having a pile of boxes with disparate things in them, that I have to move around periodically to get to the stuff on the bottom, I will have everything in nice, neat folders with labels on them.  Today I started digging through the boxes, filing what I need neatly, and throwing away outdated or useless material.

Two things.  One.  As I was going through things and thinking how relatively mundane my life/approach to this filing cabinet is, I noticed I was labeling a folder: Funeral Ephemera.  I know lots of you may be pack rats, but at the very least do I get points for creative labeling?

Two. I wrote a lot of truly terrible stuff, mostly bad poetry, but also other bits and pieces of fiction.  However, I'm surprised to find bits and pieces of fiction and poetry in these piles that aren't entirely cringe-worthy.  There's a whole story in there that I wrote as an assignment for a play, and it's not so fantastic that I'm going to start submitting it to magazines, but it's readable!  Sort of intriguing!  Perusing it doesn't make me want to burn it immediately!

I suppose the larger lesson is that it's nice to look back on who you have been and like some of it, be proud of some of it.  Mistakes are made, and regrets exist for us all, but to have experiences and relationships and work you remember fondly is a great delight.

And so, you see a beige filing cabinet, slightly used, I see a repository of delight.

Talent

For the most part, I don't think about myself as someone who has much talent of any kind (in my chosen field or in any other).  Once upon a time, this attitude was a product of true self-loathing but nowadays it's usually born of the awareness of the truly talented people I know - I know amazingly talented people, and enjoy the talent of lots of people I don't know.  Once you've met and experienced real talent, it's impossible to call your own feeble motions anything grand or successful. Even when my sweet husband says "You're amazing" to me, I tend to shrug it off, because I'm well aware I am pretty ordinary.

But.

I actually do have a talent, one I forget about until exactly the right combination of factors comes together.  I can take a handful of leftover ingredients, mix it with a few staples, and without using a recipe, I can make tremendously tasty meals.  Outrageously tasty.  The one downside is that they can only rarely be duplicated, because their creation is utterly spontaneous.

Of course I want to lead up to what I made tonight.  It was spectacular.  Let's leave aside the fact that I made homemade strawberry ice cream, because I did use a recipe for that and I made it because I got an entire flat of strawberries (8 lbs) for $0.49.  That's a ton of strawberries.  I may have to make pancakes in the morning to make this worth my while.

BUT that isn't what I made. I had a bag of grainy/orzoy/couscousy mixed goodness (trader joe's - it's really tasty no matter what you dump in with it), cooked that up (using chicken stock, thank you very much), roasted grape tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini and tofu slices in a lemon juice/olive oil marinade I just made up, tossed that all in with the mixed grains and some feta cheese, drizzled the whole thing with more lemon juice, and....it was excellent.  I was impressed in spite of myself.

It doesn't hurt that the strawberry ice cream also turned out so creamy and delicious.  Y'all - I'm not a food genius, but give me a handful of ingredients that go together and a half of an idea and you will get a great dinner out of it.  It only really works when my back is against the wall and I have to combine foodstuffs before they go bad and have to be tossed out.  But when it works, it really works.

Come for dinner sometime - you'll see.

Perspective

So, most of the time, when you audition for something, you have no way of knowing what the people in the room think about your audition, unless you get cast.  And even then (not that they would cast someone they don't think can do a role), you don't know the details of what they think - were you good at one thing and not another but they're willing to risk it?  Did you happen to complement someone they already cast?  Were you really really close to being chosen but some tiny sticking point forced them to make another choice?

You just don't know.

It was completely fascinating, therefore, to do an audition recently where I had a dependable mole in the room.  First, my audition was late in the evening, so I heard a lot of the auditioning going on beforehand. A lot of it was shouty, which made me question my approach.  My approach to this character was a woman intensely in control, and hearing all that emotion come through the wall, I doubted myself.  Was I underplaying it?  Was I choosing small, less interesting emotional journeys?

Still, I stuck to my guns and tried to stay true to the text and the moments.  I enjoyed it all hugely.  I tried to keep her control in place, to fight the way I thought she would fight, to genuinely react to the characters around me.  When asked to try scenes again, I changed what I was doing to prove I had more than one thought in my head.

It seemed to go well but I couldn't be sure.

My mole told me it was far and away clear to everyone in the room that I was ideal for this role. That I just was her.  Now, for various reasons (some political), I won't get this role.  I can handle that so much better knowing I did a great job, knowing that for an hour at least, I really was her.

And it sounds as if this whole story is about ego - yay, I was good!  Hooray!  Of course that plays into it - I love acting, I love this play, I want to be good at it, but there are two things so much more gratifying at work here for me.

One, maybe I can finally start trusting myself.  My instincts won't work for every project and every role, but I really felt I had a handle on this woman, that I knew who she was, and that knowledge was more constructive than all the emoting and yelling coming through the walls.  Knowledge trumps fervor in most cases.  I've definitely auditioned for plays where I didn't feel comfortable with the role or have a handle on who that person was, and that shows.

Two, just because I don't get cast doesn't mean I don't have talent. The stars really have to line up perfectly to give you the chances, and even this time they did not.  I have to trust that down the line, something else will come up and I can prepare and knock it out of the park and I'll be in the perfect place to make it happen.  It does break my heart just a little that I had such a good audition and that I love the play and that it would be such a great opportunity but that circumstances just do not allow me to do it.  BUT I have to trust the larger universe.  There are always more plays.  There are always more chances.  I have to keep getting better and showing up with the same level of confidence in my work.  I can't get thrown by the no's anymore, because I'm learning they may not necessarily mean "no".  They may mean, not right now, not opposite this person, not with this company.

It may be obvious, but the above is entirely for me.  Someday soon I will be feeling low, and will have been rejected from something, and will feel it means I can never do this.  I need to leaf back and remember that I can, and that more chances will come my way.  The stars are moving all the time - you never know when they will line up directly over your head and shower you with everything you want.

In the meantime, I really enjoyed that audition.  I hope I can enjoy them all that much.

Turns out....

So, I didn't get far with the board meeting.  Turns out, I had a 101.6 temperature.  I went to the meeting, tried to stay with it, and gave up 20 minutes in.

Now, I very foolishly took a hot shower after that meeting, and then registered a temperature of 102.4.

Sort of scary.

Four Tylenol and some rest later,  I was back at 98.3 this morning.

I go through this to remind myself that being that tired might, just might, be my body's way of tipping me off that something isn't quite right.

I'm hoping it's back to quasi-normal now.

Weary

I am tired beyond anything I've felt in my life.  There are times I've had less sleep than this, but this is less like physical exhaution and more like being underneath a very deep expanse of water.  The effort it took me to walk 6 blocks today was sort of hilarious - I had to sit down in the park halfway and rest.

The resting was entertaining because there was a fountain in the midst of the square where I stopped, and two ladies, seemingly unconnected to each other, had jumped a fence and plowed through some very expensive landscaping to splash around in that fountain.  While part of me looked askance at them because they clearly had to trample some plants to get in there, the other part of me said, you know, ladies, more power to you.  There's a fountain there, and you're daring to use it.

Eventually it turned out one of the ladies had left her socks right where I chose to sit down, and rather than participate in what would surely have been a very long conversation, I decided to press onwards.  I was lucky there was a bench sitting outside the elevator when I arrived at my destination.

That destination was an audition.  One in which I had to get super excited and jump around.  I will level with you: I did not think I would be able to do that.  But shockingly, when the moment came, apparently I had some reserve power.

Now I have collapsed on the sofa and I am cursing the board meeting I must attend tonight.

Someone else's house

I need a nap in the worst way, but I'm babysitting, and while this fantastic child is currently asleep (thank heaven for just this moment), I am guessing if I lay down and close my eyes, he will decide to wake up.

Still, it's raining, and the windows are open in the back of this flat, and it's such a peaceful place to be, here in someone else's house, without my own baggage and without my own mess-I-haven't-cleaned-up and with the rain coming down outside.

Now if the people in the apartment upstairs would stop having a party or re-arranging furniture or whatever loud thing is making it sound like herds of elephants live upstairs, it would be entirely lovely.

Lord, I hope beyond hope we are not this loud to our downstairs neighbors.

Callback and forth

So, things are going well professionally, at a time when I had planned to be free to do a lot of traveling.  Well, horse piss.  I've been trying to think of it as a no-lose situation - if I book this super cool project, I make a nice chunk of money, earn my Equity card, and get some probably high profile exposure in a show that's likely to be pretty moving and good.  And even if I don't, I've probably made a good impression on people who are booking professional actors for well paid work.  Plus, if I don't book this project, I will actually be free to do a bunch of traveling that I keep saying I will get around to and never get around to.

So, no-lose, right?  Win-win?  Boy, if only I could feel like this more often, I think I would perform so much more effectively in auditions.

Well, we'll see.  My impression of my good impression may be highly rose-tinted, and I know they saw a ton of great people.  There's just such a specific energy in a room when you seem to be doing well, when you seem to be giving them what they are looking for.  Years ago, I went to a callback and starting singing and the two co-directors looked at each other and nodded slightly and I thought, "Yeah, I just booked this."  And I had.  But equally, I had a long drawn-out audition a few years ago that continued and continued and continued - I sang, I read sides (bits of the script, that is), I sang from the show, I read with someone else who was auditioning, I sang again.  The accompanist came out for a bathroom break at one point and said in a whisper, "That was great."  So it all seemed positive, but I never heard a peep from them.  That one didn't faze me, but it did remind me that my sixth sense of how I'm doing is flawed at best.  And that you never know what the discussion is like on the other side of the table, and what sorts of things go into a final decision.

So now, we just live our lives.  Maybe eat a(nother) cookie or two.  Plan dream trips but don't book them.

If I can just keep auditioning like that, it'll all work out eventually.

Right on time...to screw up other plans...

Wow.  When stuff starts to happen, it really just doesn't stop happening.  Tomorrow I have to teach, go to a callback, rush from there to a voiceover booking, and from there to a commercial audition.

Then I plan to come home and collapse on the couch and watch a movie or something like that. Whew!

The callback is interesting because I walked out of the initial audition at about 4:35 pm, and got an email asking me to a callback at 4:56 pm.  I know computers and smart phones and tablets make it easier for folks to make those requests faster, but that's still really fast.  (I'm tempted to say "hella fast", but I am old and it sounds ridiculous.)

It's tricky, though, because if I book this job, I have to fudge an offer I made to my Dad, which I would do (and hopefully he would understand) but would feel awkward. (Why is it that projects are never slated for the long long stretches of time in which I have nothing whatsoever planned??)

Still, I haven't been offered the job, so at the moment, there's no conflict and I can bask in the success of being called back.  Better, I can bask in the success of having made a Really Good Impression.  How do I know that?  Because I had that experience again, the one I am happily having more and more often, where I treat myself as a professional with a point of view worth having in the room, and I ask a legitimate artistic question.  And today's question was especially genuine/  I always like to have some kind of artistic question on hand, but today's was absolutely necessary - it was a "does this character know x or not at this point in the song?"

There are several reasons this was a great question.  One, knowing or not knowing something changes how I sing the song, and by asking, I've implied I have more than one way to approach the song.  Two, in asking about this, I have proven I've read the entire play and have some understanding of the arc of this character.  Three, I've established that I am thinking about the project as a fellow artist, not as a supplicant for a job.

I think it's three that makes me the happiest, and has been the nicest part of my week.  I like acting, the doing of acting, and when I can turn auditions themselves into the doing, into the experience of figuring something out and trying it different ways, then I'm really getting to a new level in terms of my comfort with the craft.  NOT that I am mastering the craft - no, no, no.  But being comfortable with it as a discipline is far preferrable (for both sides of the table) than being obsessed with whether you get the job or not.  I probably won't get this job.  But all of those people in that room today work all over the place, and I walked in and showed them I work as well.  I think, and I haven't been in enough rooms on the other side of the table to be certain but I'm pretty convinced, that showing up prepared and behaving every minute as if I have something to contribute makes an impression, and I don't think many people do that.  I don't always do it.  Nerves win often, and wanting work can mess with your presence, and being rejected (especially after auditions that seem to go well) takes its toll.

I did a different audition last night for a team I know well - well enough that they went "hooray!" when I walked in (which was charming and lovely and I felt exactly the same about seeing both of them, hooray indeed).  And again, the best part is just being able to concentrate on the work itself, on trying to play with the words and tell the story and react appropriately.  That team called me back as well - and again, I could easily not get cast, because they have a ton of great people auditioning, but I also know they understand what I can do, and if they make another choice this time, they would still like to work with me.  It just makes the rejection so much easier to handle, knowing you were relaxed and did well and they liked it, they just couldn't choose it this time.

Oof. Now I have to go record 3 voiceover auditions and get read for my 2 auditions tomorrow.  I tell you, come late Thursday or, at the latest, Friday afternoon, I am going to lie around on the sofa and NOT MOVE.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

I was on vacation last week, and it was great.  I barely touched my computer - in fact, I wouldn't have done so except nothing ever really stops when you're on vacation, and people keep sending you audition info and sides and asking you for work things, even when you just want to go lie down on the beach and stop thinking.

This week has been a rough re-entry.  Y'all.  Sometimes, even though I know it would drive me completely crazy to actually do this, I want to move home to the South.  It's home.  Racism and close-mindedness and poverty and all, it's still home, and it has a grandeur and a warmth and a rightness that's hard to deny.  It's just...I would go nuts.  What would I do, first of all, and how would I keep from going completely insane?

For a long time, I thought there was always the secret back door of academia.  That's the place to be, where people think for a living.  But as an artist, my recent experience with academia trying to make art was awkward and disappointing.  It's art, but it's art without purpose, it's art for the sake of seeing how to make art, and that's just not enough for me.  For me, art of any kind needs a use, whether it be usable by two people or millions.  The better art is usable by more, I believe, though I'm still road-testing that theory.

I think equally disappointing is the Hollywood version of "art" which gets quotes because I think much of that art is really commerce masquerading as art.  A lot of big splashy musicals aren't really "art" - they're entertainment, without question, but it's like consuming empty calories: it will fill you up but it won't give you any nutrients.

Now, to be fair, there is plenty of great art in South Carolina.  Some of it is even theatrical.  But theatre is on a very small scale, and not the kind of scale you can make a living on even if you've got great luck and are working a lot.  There just isn't enough work out there to sustain a working actor.  Mathematically, I mean, not philosophically.

So, if I were to move back to the South, I'm pretty sure I would be giving up on everything I love.  I might be able to work, but only as a hobby.  If there's one thing keeping me going this week after a great vacation, it's that I have two awesome auditions coming up.  And had a voiceover and print booking today, so I've even earned money in my chosen profession this week.  Since I'm teaching theatre this week, one can even make the argument that all the money I have earned this week is in my chosen profession.

Still, being home makes me wish there were a city in the South - a proper city, with theatres and film studios and voice-over production houses. Until that happens, I guess I'm relegated to visiting when I can.

Or I suppose someday I might get famous enough to live wherever I want and still get the work I want.

HAHAHAHAHA....yeah, maybe that'll happen.

Time moving so fast

I feel as if it's been three months since I made a post, time is moving so fast.  Everything is happening, all RIGHT NOW, and there's not a moment to stop and write about it.  Had a lovely weekend, have finally started going to auditions, and in general I'm scrambling to keep up with everything this week so I can be on vacation next week.

What's happening is either personal and private enough that writing about it in a public forum seems foolish or silly or crass, or it hasn't seemed interesting enough to chronicle.

However, here's something that happened that doesn't fit in either camp.

Recently, I was at a general audition.  I looked around and didn't know anyone - and the room was absolutely full of people - crammed full.  Most of these people were very young, and at least two things dawned on me.  One, I was looking at the newest crop of graduates and new arrivals and freshly anointed actors.  Two, the reason I didn't know them is that for the past year and a half, I have been outrageously lucky enough (and it is luck, absolutely) to work with people who are exceptionally experienced, who have the kind of experience I can only dream about, who have longevity in this business.  I have been working with professionals, and this was a room full of wannabe professionals.

Another glance showed me that a lot of those wannabe professionals are making what seemed like massive mistakes in how they present themselves.

This has very little to do with talent.  I'll bet some of those people can sing me under the table and I guarantee you some of them will be hired by this theatre while I probably won't be.  But the way they were dressed!  The things they were saying to each other!  The songs they were choosing to sing!  Some of what I saw seemed so obviously unfortunate.  Many, many people were oddly shaped.  Now, I don't think shape alters your talent level.  (It does sometimes limit your versatility.)  But here's the thing - whatever your shape, wear something that flatters you, no matter what the current styles are!  No matter what shape you are, some clothes flatter you and others do not.  If this is confusing, pay attention to how good costume designers dress you.  Copy that.  ( I wrote that and realized that's how I was dressed last night, so take that with a grain of salt - I could be wrong.  It sounds good, but that doesn't make it true.)

Never mind.  Let's take all the appearances out of it. Let's take away my commentary on others and focus on the base level truth.  I have been out of the auditioning circuit for too long because I was fortunate enough to be working, but haven't been lucky enough to book the next gig from the handful of auditions I had time for while working.  While I was basically put together and focused, I was scared.  Scared of not being good enough, scared of not showing what I'm capable of, scared of the fact that inevitably, some of the people on that room will surpass me and have careers like the one I still dream about but haven't yet achieved.

Don't mind my babble.  I'm just scared I won't work again, and I love working.